The Spice Of Life

A few things caught my eye today while reading Variety.com. The big story was that a high quality workprint of next month's Wolverine had leaked onto the internet and was now being bitted or torrentized or whatever those crazy kids are doing these days. It used to be commonplace to download footage of movies that people were just thinking about making but these days, security improvements have made a major release like Wolverine hitting the web a month before release into such an unlikely event that I can correctly describe it as an unlikely event. (Wow, I really had no idea that sentence was going to end like that. Sorry.) Personally, I don't like downloading movies. I've seen downloaded movies before and the picture and sound usually suck. Then again, I'm not the guy to ask about this since I absolutely love going to the movies which is why I often go to movies that I think will be horrible because it can still be an enjoyable experience. Unless the movie is Bride Wars, of course. Angelina Jolie could have been blowing me while Kate Beckinsale worked the balls and I still would have been depressed coming out of Bride Wars. My point is that I worry from time to time that movie theaters will someday cease to exist. That point in time is still years away but douchebags downloading movies like Wolverine and then justify it to themselves as "sticking to the corporations" bring that time ever closer. Oh, that reminds me, have to torrent the latest Doctor Who episode.

I also see that plans are being made to remake Bright Lights, Big City. Oh...great. The 1988 version with Michael J. Fox was a sucky movie but I don't blame the moviemakers. I blame Jay McInerney, the guy who write the book. I'm betting if you Googled the words "self indulgent crap" the works of Jay McInerney would pop up*. McInerney always struck me as the kind of writer who masturbates while reading his own work because he thinks symbolism like comparing his protagonist to a coma baby was just so damn clever. Bright Lights and Slaves of New York spawned a whole rash of dumb little books that tried to deconstruct the lifestyle of wealthy New York douchebags and were really only liked by said douchebags so I really have no desire to see that genre revived. Hopefully, the box office will take care of that for me.

I swear at first I read this headline as "Steve Carrell Takes A Dump" and thought, "Wow, he's so famous he makes news for doing that." But no, nothing scatological to report here (which is a good thing, of course).

This got me excited for a second as it seems to say that Alex Proyas was trying to make a new movie set in the land of Oz but in fact is about boring tax and business stuff. If you're the kind of person who gets excited about the idea of Australian bureaucrats denying a tax subsidy to a film company because a narrow set of stringent requirements wasn't met then by God, THIS ARTICLE IS WHAT YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR! Otherwise, you can probably skip it.

And with that, I bid you ado...adu...that French word for, "So long and don't let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya."

*Actually, it turns out a very diverse collection of links pops up including a pregnancy blog, political statements and someone who specifically request music that is self indulgent crap. I, however, will assume that McInerney somehow got to the people who run Google so his name wouldn't pop up.